Vinuta Gopal
In October 2023, I was invited to speak at the KFI Teachers’ Conference being held in Chennai, at The School KFI, my alma mater. I was excited to both attend the conference and share my experience of working in the field of climate change. The School had shaped so much of my life and the choices I made, that I felt an opportunity to reflect on what my journey had been in a contentious space of climate action. was quite appropriate.
In school, I had been what one would call a ‘good student’. I was mostly happy and engaged and thrived in the environment the school nurtured. However, I had very little idea of what I wanted to do after school. I had no passionate calling nor any career plans, and to my parents’ credit, they were supportive of my general lack of direction. It was after some years of dabbling in many things, including getting certified as a Chartered Accountant (in which I had no interest), that I joined Greenpeace, an international environmental organization. This too was thanks to a former teacher in the school, someone I consider my mentor and who was also my boss in Greenpeace for many years. He had just joined the organization as their Executive Director and was setting it up formally in India. He needed an assistant and I was more than thrilled to be offered a part-time position. This was my first taste of environmental activism. I stayed on in Greenpeace for close to 16 years and quit the organization as Executive Director and mother of a two-year-old. This backstory is to provide some context as to how I entered the space of climate change and environmental action.
Cut to the present: 2023 has been declared as the hottest year on record and we have witnessed floods and droughts, Bangalore city facing a water crisis, farmer distress, and are looking at the prospect of an even warmer 2024. We are witnessing temperature rise at a pace never before seen in human history. The reason has been unequivocally established to be greenhouse gas emissions, the majority of which come from burning fossil fuels like coal, gas and oil. The situation is dire and is getting worse as we continue with business as usual. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned that the consequences of average temperature rise above 1.5 degrees centigrade is devastating for life as we know it and we are currently headed for an average warming of 2.9 degrees centigrade (if all the current country pledges are met). Not only are we facing a climate emergency, we are also pushing various planetary boundaries. More simply put, we know that things are already very bad and are going to get alarmingly worse; how terrible we cannot quite predict.
What would be an appropriate reaction to this situation? Are we in denial because it is impossible to accept the levels of risk and so we carry on with the everydayness of our lives? Would we be delusional if we felt that things can be made better? Is the appropriate response one of anger or fear or both? Should we constantly experience guilt and shame on account of the choices we make when we take a flight, switch on an air conditioner or possibly choose to have a child in this time and age? These questions are hardy perennials in my mind and possibly for many people. But before exploring my personal journey in navigating this fragmented and contested space further, it might be appropriate to unpack some of the dominant narratives that have been around.
For a very long time, in India, and in many developing countries, global warming was seen through the lens of international climate negotiations. There was deep suspicion as to the real motives of the developed world in imposing restrictions on carbon emissions while they continued to grow and industrialize. The notion of a ‘carbon budget’ that was to be split between countries didn’t go down well with anyone. This was a fight for ‘equity’ and ‘fairness’ and not necessarily a question of how to solve a complex problem. The solution that emerged from years of negotiation was to have ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ across countries. However, no one was asking the question about fairness within countries; wouldn’t the same principle of ensuring carbon space for the poor within a country be important? Weren’t the rich within a country consuming all of the carbon space of the poor?
As emissions continued to balloon, the reality that every single country had to act to bring down emissions was finally accepted in Paris in 2015, and there was a new agreement that every country would act on its emissions at a pace that would be determined by the country itself. The media discourse started shifting to acknowledge that India was extremely vulnerable to a climate crisis and hence had to respond. The political stance also shifted to adopting ambitious renewable energy targets and this was seen as a new investment opportunity, which was in India’s own interest. So now, certain kinds of climate action were no longer being imposed on us, but rather, we in India were acknowledging that this was ‘good’ for our economy and development.
Around the same time, movements, especially in Europe, like ‘Extinction Rebellion’ and ‘Fridays for Future’ started gaining momentum. They were pushing for ambitious and urgent action. Both these movements were fuelled by anger and anxiety as the primary motivators for action. They were both radical in their approach, and very successful in creating a sense of urgency and calling out political inaction and the wilful obdurateness of corporations. Greta Thunberg, a young Swedish activist, who decided to skip school to strike for climate action, emerged as a youth leader who gave voice to fears that young people and adults were experiencing. She spoke truth to power in ways that only the young can. Similar youth movements began to spring up across the globe and were instrumental in even shifting voters in many countries, giving a new impetus to ‘green’ agendas in government. However, these movements lost steam and were hard to fuel over long periods of time. The pandemic and social distancing forced the movements online which was much harder to sustain, but also gave pause and time for them to reflect.
This brings me back to my own personal journey. I was in search of something that I could commit to and that I would feel passionate about. Joining an environmental organization gave me an identity. During this time I admit that I felt the heady rush of righteous anger that propelled and motivated me to act on what I/we considered wrong. The ‘I’ blurred into the collective ‘we’ and that was strangely liberating.
Being confrontational is not an emotionally comfortable space for me as I normally shy away from it, but being part of a larger group, organization or movement, allowed me to occupy and even enjoy the power it provided. I experienced how radical thought and action could be both empowering and deeply divisive at the same time. How ideologies masked facts and the willingness to engage. It also provided clarity and simplified complexities. This was at once appealing but also resulted in less open enquiry. It was an intense experience and I learnt a lot from it. I was also glad that I stepped out and explored new ways of working on climate change.
While climate action requires many to act together, in a short period of time and with ambition, there hasn’t been much dialogue or constructive conversation across diverse actors. The discourse has been polarizing and all about finger pointing. The questions are often cast as binaries which are in opposition: for example, ‘climate mitigations vs climate justice’, ‘large corporations acting vs individual action’, ‘developed countries vs developing countries’, and the list goes on and on. As the fragmentation of ideas gets more extreme, the space for constructive and deliberative dialogue shrinks. Ideologies trump everything and nuances are discarded in a rush to simplify and compartmentalize to satisfy narrative machineries that are getting more sophisticated by the day.
In this context, I felt that there needed to be spaces to bring people together rather than further polarize them. There is also energy to be found in aligning diverse stakeholders and building collective momentum for solutions. While it is tiring and sometimes frustrating to hold space for a diverse group to build trust and be able to work with each other, when that does happen, it feels magical. It also unlocks a different kind of energy and power to make change happen. I’d like to believe that this investment in breaking down silos lasts longer as it is forced to unpack biases and open oneself to ‘different’ ideas and thought processes. At the same time, in the making, it is also as fragile as the ego of individuals in the group.
Over the last couple of years, my colleagues and I have come together to see if we can enable a deeply interconnected, inclusive, responsive and powerful ecosystem of stakeholders who work in concert to achieve ambitious climate action. We believe that many ‘small’ organizations and individuals working on issues that are at the intersection of the climate crisis—water, agriculture, migration, gender justice, livelihood, land use, and common property rights (and not just energy and climate in the traditional sense)— can come together. We don’t set up a ‘secretariat’ to coordinate the group; instead, we allow the rules and the decision-making structures of the group to form through ‘dialogue’ and ‘doing’.
The networks are normally small to start with and grow organically as we work together. For example, the Clean Air Collective that we initiated five years ago has grown from ten organizations to now more than 200 organizations and individuals, working across most states in India. We have networks across issues and geographies and so far, have initiated them across ten States. Most of the networks we build are unbranded and depend on the partner organizations to shape the future of the network. So, it is possible that each network develops a slightly different culture of working together—as long as the core values of collaborative intent, space for diverse and marginal voices and ecological sustainability are held.
As an organization and as individuals, we are learning to ‘listen’ more and ‘advocate’ less. We are also learning that unless we can mirror the trust we seek within our own organization, the inside can implode as easily as the outside might. While this might seem less radical an approach, I believe it is deeply demanding of every individual and the collective if we are to succeed in building this decentralized network. We have seen people who have never come together in the past work in concert. We have built linkages between a power plant in Maharashtra and the local community—where for the first time in this region the managers of the plant met with representatives of the local panchayat to discuss regulatory lapses.
We call this network ‘Mycelium’. The mycelium network is a web of connections that convert a forest of individual trees into a hyperconnected super-organism that can dynamically respond to threats and opportunities as a whole. A whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.