This is the first in an occasional series of reflections on updating the climate content in Terra.do’s Learning for Action course.
One September morning in 2019, I woke up early and took the train into San Francisco for a meeting that wound up canceling at the last minute. This could’ve been annoying, but I felt oddly free before realizing I was lucky. I happened to be in the right place to watch thousands of people march down Market Street in support of climate action that day.
There were teenagers, grandmothers, and tech workers. Their signs said things like “Planet over profit,” “Denial is not a policy,” and, “Make America an endless expanse of old-growth forest with no certain borders again.” Looking back through pictures on my phone, one that stands out is “We have many solutions – we must demand their use.”
That last part includes videos, quizzes, and a fair bit of reading. Course creator Dr. Kamal Kapadia, an alum of Berkeley and Oxford and astute climate communicator (she didn’t tell me to say that bit, it’s just true) wrote hundreds of slides on topics from the basic science of the greenhouse effect to what this means for increasingly extreme weather—and how we can stop this problem from getting worse. These solution areas range from the fairly obvious (clean energy) to the important but nebulous (politics, economics) to the potentially dubious but hard to ignore (offsets, carbon dioxide removal).
The conversation around climate change has evolved a lot over the five years since, but as the co-founder of a startup, Kamal’s hardly had time to single-handedly update every detail whenever a new scientific report or policy paper dropped. So in 2021 she hired me to help update the course’s content, which in sum is chonkier than a beach read but a bit shy of Great Expectations.
Over the next few months, I’ll be working on another round of updates to this content—and occasionally sharing reflections like this one from behind the curtain. Today, let’s start with how 2025 feels like a very different time than when Learning for Action got started.
Hope and courage in a warming world
People come to Terra.do looking for a lot of things. For some, it’s a path toward a job working on climate change—or toward centering climate action in their current work. For others, it’s less about their careers than their communities. (This spring my mom graduated from the program; she’s a retired librarian who sees room for her community in Alabama to step up climate action.)
One thing many fellows are hungry for lately is hope. This part might’ve been easier during the optimistic time of the climate marches I described above, when Greta Thunberg was at perhaps the height of her influence—or the years since, amid passage of the landmark U.S. climate bill known as the Inflation Reduction Act.
Now, our global fellows see U.S. leaders abandoning efforts to tackle the climate crisis—or in some cases, undermining efforts to even study it—and wonder if it’s too late to hope for meaningful action. In short, it isn’t! If you need to feel hopeful to move forward, all hope is not lost. But don’t take that as permission to click away just yet—there’s more we need to unpack.
A 2025 reality check
The planet is hotter than it used to be, and that is hurting people and ecosystems. This trend will continue until we change some big things—most importantly, our reliance on fossil fuels. You might feel grief around this situation. Our first 2025 keynote speaker Lauren Markham just published a whole book about honoring that grief without letting it immobilize us.
Indeed, though the discouraging headlines are many and your frustration is valid, it’s worth keeping a few hopeful facts in mind:
• Since Terra.do started, solar power has become the cheapest electricity in history.
• The tools of decarbonization like solar, wind, and batteries have gained considerable ground, even in unexpected places like Texas.
• At the same time, globally representative surveys have found most people want more climate action—and would even willingly pay out of their own pockets for it. The climate crowd is not checkmated.
It’s also worth noting hope isn’t the only thing worthwhile climate action rides on. For folks compelled by a need for climate justice, the motivation might be duty. For that matter, Dr. Kate Marvel, another past Terra.do keynote speaker, has written that the need for courage, “the resolve to do well without the assurance of a happy ending,” is what’s paramount.
Whatever gets you out of bed in the morning and thinking about how you’ll step up climate action, we’re glad to be on this journey with you.
I recently finished a round of tweaks to our first few classes on climate science and emissions. My next post will center our classes on impacts—perhaps the scariest part of the rollercoaster ride of learning more about climate change, and one where an awful lot has changed in the last five years. More soon!