Communication and Culture

The SOLUTIONS side of this site is about finding new ways of moving material stuff around the physical world – for instance, by growing food in ways that allow the soil to hold onto carbon atoms. But what if what you’re good at and what brings you joy is not moving matter around, but crafting words into stories or video shots into films?  

Words, art, music, and film are powerful. They shape how human beings look at the world, what we notice, what we want, what we imagine as possible, and what we think is worth fighting for. They can move us so that we organize ourselves to implement climate solutions. 

If you work in the mediums of words, images, sounds, and ideas, you can deploy your talents to serve specific, concrete purposes. For instance, you can create videos to help an activist organization recruit members, sway public opinion, and convince politicians; or you can craft a narrative that allows a climate-tech startup to convince investors or customers to take a bet on its new technology. We’ll call all of this communication.

You might also work with broader goals. Maybe you can write a novel that helps people understand climate change through the eyes of those who suffer worst from it; maybe you’ll direct a feature film that helps people imagine how we might reach a better future; maybe you’ll perform the climate anthem that tells people it’s right to be angry and to fight accordingly. (Thanks, Dolly Parton – who knew?)  Maybe you can help shape culture.

Below, we’ll give some examples of climate careers in the broad category of communications, and then we’ll offer some resources for thinking about the roles of careers in culture. The communications careers are just examples to give you a sense of the possibilities; of course, there are many more we haven’t thought of. 

Communication

Journalism

Journalists don’t just convey information; they show the public what is worth paying attention to. A journalist writing about the economic costs of climate change might focus only on economy-wide economic growth, or they might draw our attention to the way in which climate change hits marginalized communities first and worst. They might write only about the environmental destruction climate change is causing, or they might draw our attention to the many ways communities, entrepreneurs, and activist groups are working together to implement climate solutions. They might write about the conflicts in local communities about whether to allow renewable energy projects to go forward, or they might dig deeper and expose the ways in which fossil fuel companies fund misinformation campaigns to create opposition to renewables in local communities. 

Here are some writers who have built successful careers as independent climate journalists, telling stories that larger media organizations neglected.

⇒ Read Emily Atkin’s essay, “Truth Be Told,” in All We Can Save, about why she founded HEATED, and how she decided that climate change calls for journalism that is angry and that seeks to hold those who perpetuate the climate crisis accountable.

⇒ Listen to this podcast interview David Roberts, an OG climate journalist who has become one of the most influential voices in the climate space, explaining how he found his way into climate journalism.

⇒ Listen to this podcast interview with Michael Thomas, explaining how he founded Distilled to help readers cut through the noise of news about climate change and better understand the problem and potential solutions.

⇒ Check out Rollie Williams’s Youtube channel Climate Town, where he tells important climate stories in ways that are both informative and hilarious. There are many ways to do impactful journalism!

Marketing and Public Relations

Marketers and public relations professionals can help to elect terrible politicians, make us desire useless consumer goods, and greenwash the dirty activities of powerful corporations. But they can also help politicians who will fight for the climate connect emotionally with voters, help businesses offering climate solutions tell their stories to customers and investors, and build powerful support for campaigns that fight misinformation and advance climate goals. They have superpowers – and they can use them for good. Here are some examples.

Take a look at the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign. It launched the campaign in 2010, with the audacious goal of retiring the 500-plus coal fired power plants operating across America. As of June 2023, it has succeeded in closing or agreeing retirement dates for 372 of them. To do this, the Sierra Club has had to move public opinion – and to fight PR efforts funded by the coal industry. They’ve done this by employing their own marketing and public relations professionals to build a sophisticated persuasion campaign of their own, involving storytelling, podcasts, and videos like this one, mocking coal industry misinformation: Coal Will Say Anything – Beach Party 

⇒ Listen to this interview with David Fenton (or read the transcript) for a fascinating discussion of the roles that creative public relations campaigns can play in advancing progressive politics.

In order to pass laws that will advance climate solutions, we need to elect politicians who will fight for them. And to do that, we need smart, creative communicators crafting the ads and other messages that will move voters –  like this ad against climate denier Dana Rohrabacher.

As we saw on the SOLUTIONS side of the site, many of the solutions we need are being built by climate-tech start-ups. Dandelion Energy, for instance, has developed new technology for installing ground-source heat pumps in homes, making them cost-competitive with fossil fuel-based heating. To deploy this technology, Dandelion first had to convince investors that they could succeed with their product; and then they had to convince home-owners that it makes sense to switch to their technology. Their website is full of impressive work by marketing professionals – explainers, videos, blog posts – all of which help homeowners see that this solution, which is good for the planet, is also good for them and their home.

⇒ Check out Pique Action, a media company that makes mini-documentaries (and Tik Tok videos) explaining climate solutions and the start-ups working on them. 

⇒ Listen to this podcast interview with Nicole Kelner, an artist who makes educational watercolor paintings on climate solutions. Many climate startups have commissioned her art to explain their work. You can see her art here.

⇒ If you are a professional working in marketing now, check out Project Drawdown’s Job Function Action Guide for Marketing, to see how you can integrate climate concerns into the work you already do.

Further resources:

• Alder & co. is a marketing agency dedicated to climate tech.
• Tofu is a community of marketers working on climate tech. They have a newsletter you can subscribe to.
• Clean Creatives is an organization of communications professionals who have pledged not to use their skills to help the fossil fuel industry. 

Visual art, music, and film in service of movement-building

Social and environmental movements are powerful when they get ordinary people to come out of their homes and demand action. And the great movements of previous generations have taught us that art, music and film can move people – intellectually, emotionally, and finally physically – in ways that nothing else can. 

⇒ Read “Where Art Meets Organizing,” by Bill McKibben, a founder of the climate movement. The essay was written as a forward to the book Posters for the Planet.

⇒ Read Paul Engler’s essay, “Why Movements Need to Start Singing Again.”  (You might also check out this great interview, with Varshani Prakash, co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, where Prakash explains why singing is so important to work of Sunrise.) 

Finally, check out these two, great examples of video story-telling in the service of movement-building. 

Grant-writing for nonprofits

Some of the most important work in the climate fight is done by tens of thousands of community organizations and other nonprofits across the US. For instance, PUSH Buffalo is a community organization fighting for quality, affordable housing and environmental justice in Buffalo, New York. In 2019, it played a key role in the successful campaign to pass New York State’s landmark climate legislation, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA). Its work, like that of most non-profits, is highly dependent on grants (like this one) from governments and philanthropic organizations. And so to do its crucial work, it needs skilled grant-writers to make the case that its work merits financial support, and then to tell the story of what it accomplishes, so that it will be able to get the next grant. There are tens of thousands of nonprofits doing valuable climate work across the country – and grant-writing is key to what they do.

Culture

While stories, art, music, and film can all be used in service of goals like explaining a complicated topic, securing a grant, or convincing someone to buy a heat pump, vote for a politician, or join a movement – cultural forms like these also play wider and deeper roles in every human civilization. Together, they are the main way that human societies process ideas and information to make sense of their world. They engage our emotions, our intellect, and especially our imaginations in ways that mere information cannot, and so they shape our sense of what is important, what is natural, what is just, and what is possible. If we do what it takes to make a better, more livable planet, it will because our novels, films, music and art – our culture – has helped us to imagine that we can and to see that we should.

At this moment, our culture is not doing anything like this. In fact, keen observers have noticed that climate change is barely represented in our literature and other forms of art at all. The novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future historians may call this era “The Great Derangement,” because of the way that our culture has almost entirely failed to grapple with one of the greatest, world-altering processes humanity has ever faced. 

We can’t give you advice as to how to make a career shaping culture to address climate change, or even point you to stories of people who have done so. But we can point you to a few, excellent reflections on why our cultural forms have mostly failed so far, and on how crucially important it is that storytellers and artists of all kinds rise to the moment.

Further Resources:

• GoodEnergyStories.com aims to help screenwriters, novelists, and others bring an accurate climate lens to their story-telling, so that their narratives accurately reflect the ways that climate change will affect characters, settings, and the events. Check out their Playbook for Screenwriting in the Age of Climate Change.