Wednesday night brought together about 80 environmentally conscious minds at the Community Environmental Council’s Environmental Hub in downtown Santa Barbara for a salon-style TEDx event, the first of its kind held at the center.
Curated by CEC CEO Sigrid Wright and Bluedot Living’s Victoria Riskin, three previously recorded TED talks were screened, each followed by a live Q&A session.
The salon style allowed the event to coalesce around the theme of the night “Climate Action: Energized by Hope.” At a typical live TED event, the talk topics span a wide array of subjects, and there is no audience participation. But at this event, community engagement was the object of the salon.
The main takeaway from the night: There is hope in the fight against climate change. Attended by like-minded and climate-active individuals (nary a climate denier in sight) the event was not aimed to get more people on the bandwagon, but rather get activists out of the doom-and-gloom funk. “This event is to uplift and give heart to the choir,” said Wright. “You’re not alone.”
Wright kicked off the event with a speech that may as well have been a TED talk itself. She connected the climate movement to the technology adoption curve — a theory from sociologist Everett Rogers. According to Rogers, only 13.5 percent of the population needs to be an early adopter of a technology before it really starts to gain traction.
According to the latest Yale University annual climate opinion poll, 63 percent of Americans are worried about climate change, and in California that number is 71 percent.
“We don’t need everyone, just enough,” Wright said, citing examples like the seat belt law implementation, the rise in popularity of organic food, and rooftop solar.
The three screenings were talks from acclaimed climate activists: Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, Dr. Hannah Ritchie, and Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson.
Each talk was solutions based, focused on positivity, and they seemingly spoke to one another, filling the gaps in each individual argument. Wright and Riskin’s introductions and their fielding of questions during comment sections added a deeper layer to the conversation, connecting the dots and making a comprehensive thought about the climate movement and the positivity that can come from it.
CEC’s Director of Communications & Marketing Tia Kordell said that there will be another event like this one later this year, and she hopes that next one will have even more built time for community participation.
