Canvassing for Climate Action: Here's How to Make it Work

How to Save a Planet

Gimlet

Science, News, Society & Culture

4.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 21 April 2022

⏱️ 43 minutes

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Summary

What can you do if someone you know – or an entire town – isn’t on board with renewable energy? This was the dilemma facing The West Kootenay Eco Society in Trail, a small city in British Columbia. The Eco Society wanted to gain support for an energy pledge, but couldn’t gain traction within the community. Until the Eco Society’s Executive Director got the idea (from a podcast) to send volunteers door-to-door, to have personal conversations about climate solutions. To date, they’ve had over a thousand conversations and they’ve proven that a simple discussion can yield a lot of action. Guests: Montana Burgess, Rebecca Richards, Kade Moroney Calls to Action If you want to give deep canvassing a try, check out the West Kootenay Eco Society, the Deep Canvass Institute, and the People’s Action Campaign If there isn’t a deep canvassing campaign near you, but there’s a local organization you think could use the technique, reach out to them and the New Conversation Initiative, who helped the West Kootenay Eco Society develop their script Check out our Calls to Action archive for all of the actions we've recommended on the show. Send us your ideas or feedback with our Listener Mail Form. Sign up for our newsletter here. And follow us on Twitter and Instagram. This episode of How to Save a Planet was produced by Anna Ladd. The rest of our reporting and producing team includes Kendra Pierre-Louis, Rachel Waldholz, Hannah Chinn, Daniel Ackerman, and Meg Driscoll. Our supervising producer is Katelyn Bogucki. Our editor is Caitlin Kenney. Sound design and mixing by Peter Leonard with original music from Peter Leonard and Emma Munger. Our fact checker for this episode was Nick DelRose. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to How To Say With Planet, I'm Alex Bloomberg and this is the show about what
0:06.4	we need to do to address climate change and how to make those things happen.
0:24.5	Our story today starts with a woman named Montana Burgess who after years of working for
0:29.2	big environmental nonprofits in Canada was feeling disenchanted. She'd work on these national
0:35.0	campaigns or go to these big international climate conferences, then come home and not see much
0:40.4	local impact from the work she was doing. And so she decided to chuck it all, leave life in the big
0:45.7	city and she moved to an area near where she grew up in British Columbia, an area called the West
0:50.8	Coutonies, where there's a bunch of small towns. And she started volunteering and working with a
0:56.4	smaller locally led nonprofit called the West Coutonie Eco Society. I just become the executive
1:03.2	director for the organization and we had just launched a hundred percent renewable energy transition
1:08.5	campaign. So the goal of this campaign was to get the local governments in the West Coutonies,
1:13.6	the local town and city governments, to commit to transition to one hundred percent renewable
1:18.8	energy by 2050. So inspired by other cities like Vancouver in British Columbia and Oxford
1:26.3	County in Ontario and many cities in the US as well, we wanted our local governments to do their
1:32.7	part to tackle climate change in their backyards and say yes to transition to a hundred percent
1:38.3	renewable energy across all community energy uses, not just electricity but like transportation,
1:43.2	heating and cooling, all that. And to get local governments to commit to that pledge, Montana
1:48.5	and Eco Society staff and volunteers would go from town to town and collect signatures on a
1:53.3	petition which they would deliver to the local governments. If the governments then voted in
1:58.9	favor, they would become part of this coalition of towns in the Coutonies all working together on a
2:04.2	transition plan. And a lot of the local governments and the people who lived there didn't need
2:10.4	much convincing. They were already on board with the idea that they needed to tackle climate change
	...

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