These days, it’s rare to hear conversations around climate change that have hope at the core, but for award-winning speaker Molly Kawahata, it’s essential.
A former climate advisor to the Obama administration, Kawahata is a strategist, advocate and ice climber featured in a Patagonia film titled The Scale of Hope. She has an innate ability to connect with the audience, using her diagnosis with bipolar II disorder and her family’s internment in Japanese concentration camps in the United States as the groundwork for hope as a mindset. She merges the science behind hopeful mindsets into climate change discourse.
Kawahata was in Whistler at the Fairmont Jan. 29 for a speaking event titled “Whistler’s Community Conversations on Climate,” organized through Vail Resorts Epic Promise, where the former advisor gave a keynote speech before a panel discussion.
Molly Kawahata's hopeful message
Kawahata's hour-long presentation provided a refreshing voice amongst depressing narratives, where she suggested anyone wanting to make change needs to reframe the climate crisis as a human health issue, because human health is not up for negotiation. Economic arguments can fall into traps about balance, and environmental narratives exclude the impacts on people that can spur action. By merging hope and human health, Kawahata creates a recipe others can use to push the dial on climate change.
But it wasn’t always a mindset she ascribed to.
“Growing up, I had noticed that my mind didn't seem to work as well as I thought everyone else did. I would get these really debilitating lows. It was hard to get out of bed, and yet I couldn't sleep. I started avoiding human interaction, until at one point I had this sinking feeling that living a long life is probably not going to be in the cards for me,” she said. “And then I would also get these alarming highs. I'd be awake for days on very little sleep. I'd go to the gym at 2 a.m., [have] periods of extreme productivity, I'd send rambling emails I later had to apologize for.”
It would be a decade before Kawahata was diagnosed with bipolar II disorder, which she openly discusses as a part of her own narrative arc. She would go on to learn about a man running for the U.S. presidency who was talking about hope. His message resonated with her, and she began campaigning for Barack Obama as a teenager and eventually ended up working in the White House as a climate advisor.
While campaigning, Kawahata learned a huge amount about messaging strategy. One of the strategies she and others used to encourage support for Obama was in the story they told about him. At the time, he was considered a long shot for the Oval Office. Instead of saying he could win the presidency, which inherently includes the concept that he also could not, she and others started saying it was inevitable.
“When people heard he was going to win, they wanted to be a part of it,” Kawahata said. “If you give people a bandwagon, they will jump on it, but you’ve got to give them the bandwagon. So, the question is, what is the bandwagon you are giving for your purpose, for your mission, for your organization? What are we doing for climate? What is that bandwagon?”
Climate change panellist discussion
Climate change’s impacts on Whistler strikes at the core of the town’s identity as a winter destination. Whether it’s receding glaciers, Wedgemount and Horstman, or less precipitation, wildfires, drought and landslides, residents understand the existential threat it has. A packed house of Whistler non-profit organizations showed up to listen to Kawahata and a group of panellists, moderated by Kate Wilson, Vail Resorts’ vice president of environmental and social responsibility.
Panellists included Squamish Nation Chief Ian Campbell; Lil’wat Nation member and founding member of Indigenous Women Outdoors, Sandy Ward; freeskier and founder of the Canadian chapter of Protect Our Winters Canada, Mike Douglas; and Luisa Burhenne, manager for climate and environment at the Resort Municipality of Whistler.
The hour-long discussion covered climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies, mental health and youth empowerment, and more.
To start off, Wilson honed in on Burhenne to ask what innovation strategies non-profits could use to reduce their carbon footprints.
Burhenne began by saying successful strategies both lower carbon footprints and increase community resiliency.
“The biggest impact of climate change is unpredictability," she said. "We don't actually know what's going to happen. And I think it's really important that we realize we are at a point right now where we can't focus on greenhouse gas emission reduction only. We really also have to focus on increasing our resilience and connecting as a community at the same time to be flexible and prepared for all of these unpredictable changes that we'll be seeing.”
Data backs up Burhenne’s point. According to the United Nations (UN), the world has already surpassed 1.5 degrees of warming from February 2023 to January 2024. A 1.5 degree of warming was the limit set by countries under the 2015 Paris Agreement. Hitting this global temperature increase does not mean the world hasn’t met the agreement's goals, because the goal is set for long-term increases over decades, not monthly or yearly. Temperature fluctuations are expected in the short-term because of El Nińo and La Nińas and volcanic activity. However, the UN calls it a warning sign of what’s to come.
Earth warmed by 1.2 C from 2014 to 2023 above the pre-industrial baseline set in 1850 to 1900. Current warming is causing “intensifying extreme weather events, alarming reductions in ice sheets, sea ice, and glaciers, and several mass coral bleaching events, with widespread harms to people, economies, and nature.”
Burhenne pointed to transit and active transportation as means to adapt to climate change, encouraging businesses to provide free transit passes or Evo bike-sharing memberships. The second suggestion she pointed at was a mitigation strategy used by the RMOW: fuel-thinning and FireSmart.
Next, Wilson tapped Douglas to discuss youth and climate anxiety, asking how they can be empowered.
“I don't think it's just young people. I think we all feel it to a certain degree, and I'm not immune to it,” he said.
Douglas highlighted the film he created with Pemberton youth, Sam Tierney, called Sam & Me, and stressed that action and organizing are the key.
“[Saying] ‘we have to solve climate change,’ that's absurd," he said. "Like, how are any of us going to solve climate change? You know, the United States, if it chose to tomorrow, probably cannot solve climate change. So, you have to break it down into small pieces that you can chip away at, set some goals."
In addition, taking time to care for your own well-being when doing the work can include unplugging from the digital realm and getting outside to connect with the mountains.
Campbell and Ward also highlighted connection to the outdoors as important pieces in ensuring Indigenous youth can move from survival to well-rounded lives.
“I’ve been working with Indigenous youth for the majority of my life, and what I've really noticed is there isn't a sense of a fear in climate, whether or not because they're focusing so hard on surviving," Ward said. "What we do with our programs is we provide that experience together on the land, so they have that connection to the land, and that fosters that growth of wanting to protect it."
