Watching people get bitten

This week, I witnessed something a little bit awesome and a little bit funny.

A new colleague (I’ll call him Dave, n.h.r.n) who is a consultant but extremely new to the climate space, was part of an online meeting I was in.

One of the other sustainability consultants on the call was introducing themselves to Dave, and fed him a firehose of climate information in the space of 4 or 5 minutes.

When the consultant finished speaking, Dave looked so confused I didn’t know whether to say something or just laugh… I was already on mute, so I just switched my camera off.

To be clear, I wasn’t laughing at Dave (although his confused face was funny).

He’d just been slung so many concepts, acronyms, statistics and reports, that it was comical to think someone could understand it and take it in, all in one go.

It was a clear curse of knowledge situation that I’d never actually seen unfold in real time like that before. That’s the funny part.

The awesome part was that I think I witnessed someone get bitten by the climate bug. Dave was confused for sure, but left the meeting determined not to be confused for long – he asked for resources to get him up to speed.

That’s when he got hit by the second wave: A list as long as his arm which included books, webinars, websites, videos, Twitter accounts, podcasts, and email courses to go check out in his own time – which are all awesome and I recommend them here often – but made me realise just how tedious it can be to get professionally up to speed with the whole climate thing. Then understand what opportunities exist within it.

It’s a minefield.

I don’t have the answer for how to get up to speed fast in the climate space, but what I will say is take the recommendations that come your way, and filter for voices you like.

The news headlines might all be singing from the same doom and gloom songsheet, but the commentators, experts, and “top green voices on Linkedin” certainly don’t sound the same.