👋 Hi, everybody! This week, we’re revisiting a question that’s at the core of what this newsletter is about: What motivates people to take climate action, and how can those actions add up to real systematic change? I had the opportunity to talk with a sociologist whose work sits right at the heart of that question. She calls herself an “apocalyptic optimist” — a phrase I just might borrow. 

We’ve also got news stories for you about El Niño, the Supreme Court, and the new Tom Cruise movie. 

This post originally appeared in Grist’s weekly solutions newsletter, Looking Forward. Not on our list yet? Subscribe here to get it in your inbox every Friday.

How societal change happens

Photo of a protest sign reading Earth Against Oligarchy, with protesters holding flag in the background

David McNew / Getty Images

As a climate solutions journalist, I have basically devoted my career to learning and writing about the things people are doing to address the climate crisis — where they get started, how they work, what successes they achieve and obstacles they encounter. That’s left me particularly interested in the *why* of it all — why people choose to get involved in climate action, and what that means at a societal level. This week, I got to talk with Dana Fisher, a sociologist and director of the Center for Environment, Community, and Equity at American University. She has devoted her career to that very question, looking particularly at how climate shocks influence societal change. 

We considered a similar question in the newsletter a few weeks ago — my colleague Jake Bittle had written a story about newly released Gallup data examining how extreme weather impacts people’s attitudes about the future. One of the core findings was a bit grim: People who reported experiencing extreme weather disruptions were less likely to feel a sense of agency over their own future, and more likely to feel “pushed by circumstances beyond [their] control.”

But Fisher’s research tells another part of that story — one that’s focused less on attitudes and more on action. 

“I’m a political sociologist — and that really doesn’t mean anything except for a bunch of gobbledygook to the rest of the world,” Fisher joked. “Except for, what it does mean is I’m interested in people’s behaviors.”

In 2019, she and another researcher, Andrew Jorgenson, put forward a theory they called the AnthroShift, explaining how society reorients itself in response to risks. 

“What we say in that theory is actually that you see these different configurations of who’s the strongest part of society,” Fisher said. In other words, sometimes the direction of societal change is being driven top-down by governments, sometimes by economic forces, and sometimes by civil society. But “there are moments in time where we see risk becoming very strong, so people have this perception of risk that gets so big that it basically gets all of these actors to reorient themselves in response to what we call a risk pivot,” she explained.

So essentially, when a risk reaches a critical threshold, it triggers large-scale societal change, which can include mass mobilization against whatever the threat is. We’ve seen that happen historically with world wars, economic depressions, and more recently the COVID-19 pandemic. (One thing Fisher emphasized to me about the idea of the AnthroShift is that it is multidirectional. Just as society changes, it can change back.) 

Fisher is particularly interested in when and how this might happen for climate change, and what forces might be able to make it happen.

In a 2022 paper examining some lessons from the pandemic, she concludes that the push for a radical reorientation to change our trajectory on climate change likely needs to come from civil society — from the grassroots up — but concedes that without a major shock, it’s difficult to imagine being able to trigger sustained, mass mobilization against the climate threat.

Critics of the AnthroShift theory note that it only leaves room for disaster or risk as a catalyst for change. It’s not impossible that climate activists and communicators could, through more creative means than simply waiting for the crisis to get bad enough, galvanize enough people to make a difference. 

That brings us back to the way average people are responding to climate impacts today. Unlike the COVID-19 virus, climate-fueled disasters are somewhat more disjointed and localized — a heat wave here, a flood there. But Fisher’s research, including a recent paper that is currently undergoing peer review (a preprint is available here), has found that these shocks do correlate to higher levels of civic engagement. In that survey, people who experienced events like extreme heat or storms were more likely to report engaging in activities like attending a public meeting or a protest. The correlation was strongest for people who identified as political moderates, in the realm that Fisher and others call the “moveable middle.” 

“That’s why I’m an ‘apocalyptic optimist,’ because I’ve seen the research, and now my research is replicating this idea that it’s the experience of these things that actually does galvanize action,” Fisher said. “When I was studying climate change in the 1990s and writing about it, we just did not see that kind of concern because people weren’t actually experiencing the crisis firsthand.”

These findings don’t necessarily contradict that Gallup data we covered previously. People might feel a lack of control over the future, yet still take action to help their community be better prepared for it. As we discussed in that newsletter, it’s also very challenging to study the dynamics of how disasters influence people’s thinking and actions over time — a sentiment that Fisher echoed. She likened it to looking through a peephole; it’s up to her team to position the peephole in the best way possible to try and get a snapshot that tells them something about what’s really going on in the world. 

As we wrapped up our conversation, I wanted to point the proverbial telescope toward another topic that seems to be mobilizing people right now: data centers. I asked Fisher if she viewed the reaction against data centers as the beginnings of an AnthroShift.

“It’s funny because when we wrote it, it was written specifically to think about the environment, but it definitely applies generally to a sense of risk and how society responds to risk,” she said. Data centers do pose a risk to our climate and environment — but it’s more than that, Fisher said. “It’s exacerbated by the sense of inequality, and the fact that people are starting to feel like they have less and less control over what the government or businesses are doing around their community.” 

There are lessons for climate action there, she said. “As climate change gets closer and closer, I think we’re going to see opportunities for coalitions that are unexpected to build, because people are going to feel risk in a more universal way at the local level.”

Dive deeper:

More from Grist

🌡️ Heating up

Speaking of extreme weather wake-up calls — you may have heard that we are in a “super” El Niño year, the naturally occurring weather pattern in the Pacific Ocean associated with extreme heat and other disruptions. This unusually strong El Niño could be a preview of what global warming will bring in the coming decades. Read more

⚖️ See you in court

On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Suncor v. Boulder, a lawsuit brought by the city of Boulder, Colorado, against oil majors to cover the costs of local climate adaptation. The case has drawn some unlikely alliances, and could have impacts on future efforts to hold big polluters accountable for their role in causing climate change. Read more

🎥 Box office

Digger, a new film in which Tom Cruise plays a coldhearted oil executive, will reach theaters throughout the U.S. today, and it’s likely to be the biggest climate movie of the year. My colleague caught an early screening and found the parable heavy-handed, and the screaming matches unpleasant. Read more

In other news

And finally, looking forward to …

… life after the AnthroShift.    

📉📉📉

Your daughter comes home from school distressed, again. History class often upsets her — and really, why wouldn’t it? Today the kids learned about Doomsday Summer, one of the worst times in living memory. You were barely a teenager when it happened. And then, the transition years began. 

You try to console her by telling her about some of the good things that followed. How you and your friends got to enroll in community college early, and joined the Clean Energy Corps. How her mom was one of the researchers fast-tracking tech solutions. How much the climate has stabilized since then. 

— a drabble by Claire Elise Thompson

📉📉📉

A drabble is a 100-word piece of fiction — in this case, offering a tiny glimpse of what a clean, green, just future might look like. Want to try writing your own (and see it featured in a future newsletter)? We would love to hear from you! Please send us your visions for our climate future, in drabble form, at [email protected] 

👋 See you next week!