January 21, 2020
One of our goals is to bring the environmental breakdown discourse from the academic and political stages of the world into our homes. This means to make the discourse tangible, and apply it in our daily lives. That’s why we roll out environmental blog posts and initiatives every Friday.
To make sure that our posts and initiatives have the biggest impact with the minimum effort, we must learn from King David. Young King David killed heavily armed Goliath with nothing else than a slingshot. Just like King David, we don’t have many weapons. We are economically, socially and legally disarmed. Yet, our environmental culture can be a strong weapon. Through strategic planning we can turn it to one of the most accurate and deadliest environmental slingshot in Trentino. Remember the Wonder of Malls story? The story about a small village in Upper Vinschgau that stopped the apple orchards invasion and banned pesticides? Malls is the model we look at. Malls is our King David.
To learn how to be strategic and prepare that slingshot, we must analyze and learn from other environmental initiatives. Let’s start in Davos. Less than two weeks ago the famous Swiss town hosted the World Economic Forum. Three great speakers hold the floor. Their language style can help us improve our communication and equip our slingshot. Let’s have an analytical look at their speeches and the language they used.
Donald Trump
Current US President
- Use of detailed economic data trends and statistics to argument his thesis
- Optimistic view about global development
- Rejection of pessimistic views of some environmentalist movements: Radical socialism that tries to manipulate heads
- Metaphoric language to link beauty of the past with the potential beauty of the present and future
- Concrete plan for the environment: US will join the One Trillion Trees Initiative
- Take home message: US economy is prospering and it will propel the prospering of the world’s economy.
Greta Thunberg
2019 person of the year for TIME Magazine
- Use of science based facts (e.g. the IPCC)
- Direct criticism against the inaction of major economic institutions of the world
- Disenchantment from environmental ambitions of politicians and world’s businessmen
- Apocalyptic language style promoting sense of guilt and panic
- Concrete plan for the environment: continue on criticizing until something is actually done. She does not mention any concrete plan, but her Fridays For Future strikes keep on occurring every Friday around the world
- Take home message: You are not doing enough.
Ursula von der Leyen
President of the EU commission
- Less use of data and monitoring programs, only some examples (e.g. California and China)
- View on the climate crisis: We can still make it through this enormous issue but the window to solve it is getting narrower
- Future oriented speech: possible EU strategies, solutions and goals
- Concrete plan for the environment: New Green Deal for Europe
- Take home message: We must act now and we must act together.
During the World Economic Forum there was an outrageous discrimination event against African environmental activist Vanessa Natake [4].
This bring us to an another thought that we will consider while building up our slingshot. Although Europe is indeed pushing more than others to tackle the environmental breakdown, environmentalism cannot be tagged as a topic for “rich, white European socialists”. Environmentalism must be decoupled both from wealth status, skin color and political belonging. That’s why we encouraged and will continue encouraging environmental lovers around the world to join us and become environmental bloggers.
Bibliography:
[1] CNBC TV. Watch President Donald Trump’s full speech at the Davos World Economic Forum. Davos.
[2] World Economic Forum. Greta Thunberg on Averting a Climate Apocalypse | DAVOS 2020. Davos.
[3] World Economic Forum. Special Address by Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission. Davos.
[4] Okereke, C., Busari, S., 2020. She was cropped out of a photo of white climate activists. Now, she says it’s time to stop erasing African voices [WWW Document]. CNN. URL https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/30/africa/uganda-activist-vanessa-nakate-cropped-intl/index.html (accessed 1.31.20).
