Do you choose fear or fun?

I enjoy finding the lighter side of the climate situation–the opportunities and funny situations that come up through the day–but I never want to be flippant about it.

There’s a lot of bad news about just how serious the situation is becoming. On LinkedIn alone, I follow dozens if not hundreds of people commentating on climate in one way or another… the feed can become pretty overwhelming some days.

For me personally, fear has always been a strong de-motivator.

For many climate issues I can see there are solutions, or at least options. Things like waste management – I don’t know how to deal with all of the waste issues, but I see amazing solutions like Kompan, the company who builds playground equipment from recycled materials, or the emergence of plastic roads.

But when I see stats and numbers and charts and graphs showing climate situations painted in a “this is the point of no return” context, my subconscious reaction is different. Whether I want it to or not, my brain just switches off and says “Welp! That’s that” and my solutions radar never even gets a chance to switch on.

The climate situation is not great, but the climate solutions space is booming – for me, it’s all in the framing… I can wallow in the negative news I see every day and just tune out; or I can tune in for opportunities to fix things.

The climate space is actually really fun: There’s wicked innovation, awesome people everywhere, incredible startups, eye-watering amounts of investment money, customers who want to support climate-conscious businesses… and as shared yesterday, a growing number of ways that any of us can contribute to the solution, rather than lingering on the problems.