War of Words

https://grist.org/article/the-war-on-climate-the-climate-fight-are-we-approaching-the-problem-all-wrong/?fbclid=IwAR0OYVBHkgcqHa9ttEQbnlFgoL4AEHaMiOpG6zV_hx313MFMCr2q0qsfGaM

By Kate Yoder on Dec 5, 2018

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The whole “fighting climate change” frame rests on the assumption that opposition is the best way to get things done. But that’s not always the case, as the linguist Deborah Tannen wrote in The Argument Culture: Stopping America’s War of Words back in 1998. Military and sports metaphors train us to see everything in terms of conflict — this side versus that side — and that perspective limits our collective imagination about what we can do to fix complex problems.

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War narratives are everywhere, so prevalent that they usually pass unnoticed. Politicians and the media have declared wars on poverty, drugs, obesity, and terror. There’s also supposedly a war on Christmas. These wars were declared against concepts, trends, and tricky issues with no simple solutions. And none of them have been won.

Reading Tannen’s book, I saw these metaphors in a new light. There’s a “pervasive warlike culture” in the U.S. that leads us to approach just about any major issue as if it were “a battle or game in which winning or losing is the main concern,” she wrote. It’s a deeply entrenched cultural tendency that has shaped politics, education, law, and the media.

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Hostility is definitely in fashion. Anger spreads faster across social media networks than any other emotion, as studies have shown (and anyone who’s spent more than one minute on Twitter can attest). Cable news has devolved into shouting matches.

In recent years, American discourse has been swept further and further along the River Vitriol. “Americans on both the left and the right now view their political opponents not as fellow Americans with differing views, but as enemies to be vanquished,” wrote Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld, two professors at Yale Law School, in a recent Atlantic essay about tribalism.

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I get that this war message works for some people, though. In a study published in the journal Environmental Communication last year, participants read one of three articles about the effort to reduce carbon emissions, which was framed as either a “war,” a “race,” or an “issue.” Those who read the war version perceived the most “urgency and risk” and expressed “greater willingness to increase conservation behavior.”

That’s the spirit behind The Climate Mobilization, a group that invokes the war mentality in the service of climate action. According to the organization’s director, Margaret Klein Salamon, we can radically and quickly transform society to address climate change, taking inspiration from World War II.

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Psychologists from the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Colorado at Boulder found that most Republicans believed climate change was real, but didn’t support policies to address the problem simply because they thought Democrats did. Climate change, in other words, has been packaged together with issues such as immigration and gun control, and positions have turned into symbols of opposing sides. Why? “The study suggested that the discrepancies were likely the result of a media landscape that emphasized conflict,” Newsweek reported.

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It reminds me of something I first noticed in high school, listening to my classmates yell insults at rival teams during football games. (I didn’t want to attend, believe me — I had to be there for marching band.) While they called it “school spirit,” I deemed it “zip-code loyalty” — a term meant to illuminate that our school district was determined by physical addresses that kids like us had no control over. My point was that we had been pitted against one another by outside forces, and we really weren’t different from the supposed “enemy.” (My other point was that I didn’t like sports.)

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In a similar vein, labor and environmental groups that often squabbled over issues in the past have come together to start talking climate policy. At the Colorado Climate, Jobs, and Justice Summit this fall, union members who work in the fossil fuel industry shared their perspectives on taking care of communities who depend on the industry.

“For many in the environmental community, it was the first time they had heard those stories,” wrote Dennis Dougherty, executive director of the Colorado AFL-CIO, in a column in the Denver Post. “And in turn, it was the first time many workers got to interact face-to-face with folks from the environmental movement and learn how diverse and compassionate its members could be.”

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Charles Eisenstein, author of the newly released book Climate: A New Story, agreed with me that framing an important problem like climate change as a fight stokes partisanship. It widens any divide while simultaneously obscuring grounds for agreement. After all, warriors need their enemies.

“There is a time and a place for resolving problems by fighting,” he told me, “but it’s kind of taken over everything.”