Combating the climate crisis by changing how we connect and converse (introducing EarthNet)

After years of complicity, it’s time to subvert Twitter, Facebook and other Big Social Media. Here’s why and how to start.

By Kai Chan

One riff off the "YouTwitFace"
meme, from Pinterest.

In 2009, Conan O’Brien went viral with his joke about the future when the big social media companies YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook would all join to become YouTwitFace.

This inspired a meme and myriad riffs on all three of those platforms and more—by thousands of users … who kept right on using these highly addictive, polarizing, society-distorting platforms.

The joke is on us.

I’m no different. I was a holdout on all of these platforms, but I’m now a user of several. You almost can’t have much social influence these days without complying.

But now I see part of the way out. It involves working to build alternative platforms—that are designed for social action and meaningful connection—and bleeding market share away from the big for-profit companies that peddle in our attention and behaviours.

The Problem, In Broad Strokes

‘Big Tech’ has way too much power over our lives and societies. Social media companies distort policy through direct lobbying, and they enable others to distort elections and key social and health programs by spreading misinformation and sowing dissent. They elevate memes over truths, clickbait over news, trolls over meaningful conversation. And they directly fuel an economic model that manipulates our needs and desires to buy more.

Distortion and Dissent

A burned US flag after the Jan 6 insurrection at Capitol Hill,
Washington, DC. Flikr

I’ve already written about how social media has a deeply polarizing effect on society, after watching The Social Dilemma. And much has been written on this topic, e.g., in the New York Times. In a nutshell, because surprising half-truths and plausible lies generate attention and sharing, and because of algorithms that feed people content like what they’ve read and shared before, social media can produce echo chambers of conspiracy theories fuelling QAnon and dangerous lies about an illegitimate US presidential election of Joe Biden in 2020. Here, I unpack two related facets.

Memes > Truths … Clickbait > News … Trolls > Conversation

I joined Twitter in 2011 as an experiment. I wanted to see how people were using this platform. Is there an opportunity to advance meaningful conversation, I wondered—without spending many hours skimming and elevating conversations that don’t feel important? I’m not saying “No”, but after more than a decade, I haven’t seen it.

How could a series of 280-character snippets culminate in a meaningful argument? What convinced me to investigate this was the notion that tweets could be much more than a tiny passage of text, because they could include links. Thus, a tweet could be an ad to a blog post or an article, that would really permit delving into the details. I tried this for years.

The problem is that—even if the format enables this facilitation of longer-form arguments—the vast majority of users don’t look to Twitter for this content. They look to it for the snippets and images. They like or skim over and move on. And the comments on these tweets often come from trolls, and often based just on the tweet/headline. As one recent example, when I tweeted an article about housing and tax policy, 3 of the first 4 comments were dismissively reactionary. Most clearly hadn’t read the article.

Meanwhile, my students do incredible things, like run ALL of Vancouver’s streets—1557 km (almost 1000 miles) while doing a PhD—and I can’t get them much love.

Fuelling Runaway Consumption

Perhaps the deepest problem with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram and the like, is that their whole business model is rooted in helping sell you things you mostly didn’t need, which is a key ultimate driver of the climate-and-ecological crisis.

Social media companies do this directly in two ways, not primarily via the countless influencers and celebrities that use these platforms to sell products and their visions of the world. The first way is of course advertising, which is a major revenue source for many of these ‘free’ platforms.

The second way is by selling your data—about your preferences and behaviours—to companies that seek to sell you things you don’t already want, or to manipulate you to do things you wouldn’t otherwise do. This is a primary revenue source for Big Social Media. There is no route more direct to boost runaway consumption.

Beyond consumption, the danger of this manipulation of our desires is that it furthers the myth that many of us don’t already have the roots of a good life (we do)—in our relationships with people and places—and that we can buy our way to happiness (we can’t). Arguably, these notions of a good life are even more fundamental to our current crises than the consumption itself.

A Partial Antidote: A Nonprofit Social Network Designed for Action

As I see it, the way forward has several key pieces. One is to limit our engagement with Big Social Media, and to use those platforms partly or largely to undermine the power they have over others (e.g., by making a public commitment and leading others to reflections/rationales like this one here). A second is to help build alternatives.

There are already some options that do most of what some of these platforms do, but without the profit motive and/or selling data. Signal is a messaging app like WhatsApp run by a non-profit organization; they don’t even store data linked to you. Ecosia is a search engine based on Google but that uses its profits to plant trees where they’re needed (search engines share some of the same issues described here). Ecosia is a B-corp (benefit corporation), meaning it exists for the purpose of advancing social and/or environmental causes, not only making profit. It still runs ads (that’s the revenue source), but there isn’t the potential deeper level manipulation.

CoSphere's hub on EarthNet.

And now there’s EarthNet, a social network platform designed to connect people and foster collaboration across the environmental movement. You can easily create your own page, and control who sees what and how your data are used, unlike many platforms that are rooted in using your data for revenue. The interface is stripped-down to enable you to engage with meaningful content and conversation (including fact-checking), not designed to divert your attention away to other rabbit-holes. This nascent platform is still very much a work-in-progress, but now is the time to engage to help build it to serve as a foundation for a better internet and a better world.

The ‘catch’ is that EarthNet is a paid platform (albeit one “that puts planet over profit”). Unlike Facebook, you can’t create content on it for free (after the trial period). Some people—probably many—will see this as a major drawback. That’s my reaction, too: I like free stuff. The key is to keep reminding ourselves that there is no free lunch. If someone is providing a service apparently for free, they’re making money off you in other ways—likely ways that you wouldn’t like. Obviously lots of folks aren’t currently in a position to pay for these services. But if you are, maybe it’s worth it.

I believe it is, so CHANS Lab and CoSphere (a Community of Small-Planet Heroes) are proud to be on EarthNet.

CHANS Lab Views by Kai Chan's lab is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://chanslabviews.blogspot.com.

Why You Need a Theory of Change

Plus, What That Is, and How to Start Building One

Kai Chan

This is part of a series, How to Write a Winning Proposal—in 10 Hard Steps

It’s become de rigueur among NGOs and foundations to have and expect a theory of change. It’s just as important for researchers and scholars in an environmental or sustainability context. But few of us make these theories explicit, which greatly limits our contributions to a better world.

Change—An Ultimate Purpose

Unlike academia in general, effecting change is a key purpose in sustainability science. The vast majority of our program’s prospective students have clearly gravitated toward research with the hope that it can contribute to a better world. Many of us realize that globally, we’re not on a great track, and we don’t know all that we need to know to get on that better track. Honestly, I don’t think I’d take on a student who wasn’t motivated to contribute to change.

Some people need to understand
how we theorize change to happen
before they can jump on board.

Theory Matters

But why do we need to theorize about the change our work might effect? Isn’t it obvious that discovering more about how the environment functions, or how technology or policy might improve human outcomes, would seamlessly and linearly yield that better world we seek? (This is the ‘linear model’ of science and policy.)

Ah, no. That’s rarely how the world works. In his book The Honest Broker, Roger Pielke Jr. reviews the problems with this linear view of science contributing to policy. Related, Naomi Oreskes has revealed the messy histories of science yielding policy change.

The truth is that we’re still learning a lot about how change happens, not just about environmental and social-ecological problems or technological ‘solutions’. Theory is central to how we learn about these problems and solutions, why is it such an afterthought for how our research contributes to change? 

Presumably it’s because our thinking and our institutions are still structured around the linear model, even though we know it to be false.

We can do better—by being explicit about our theories of change, and testing them.

What is a Theory of Change?

For many, it’s not even clear what a theory of change is. It sounds so simple, but we academics tend to overcomplicate things.

Take this definition, for instance, from an otherwise-helpful paper about theories of change: “a process for individual and organizational learning that includes analysis of actions, outcomes, and consideration of the explicit and implicit assumptions about how actions and outcomes are interconnected”. This seems to conflate the theory of change itself with the process of articulating it.

Let’s make it simple. For me*, a theory of change is how actions yield outcomes. Precisely, it's a set of explicit and implicit assumptions about how actions might yield outcomes.

Without a sensible theory of change, we may
find ourselves on a bridge to nowhere.

Theories of Change in Research vs. Practice

Theories of change are already very popular among NGOs. But they’re rarely tested and often full of important unspecified assumptions. It’s not clear that such a static approach is helpful anywhere (more on this another time), but it seems entirely contradictory in a research context, where a key purpose is learning.

Thus, our task is to make as many of the important assumptions explicit, so we’re not caught unawares by what we didn’t know we didn’t know.

Examples and Stories

My own career can be understood as a process of dabbling with different theories of change, as I vaulted from one field/literature to another.

I started in ecology and evolution, where effecting change wasn’t the prevailing purpose (so a theory of change didn’t really make sense). And it was obvious to me that there was a huge gulf between knowledge and practice.

When I sought a more direct link, I tinkered with philosophical ethics while studying public policy. It struck me that the prevailing theory of change was, “Deliberation, introspection, and reasoned argument will inspire norm change.”

But most people don’t derive their lifestyles and choices from deliberation and introspection (Daniel Kahneman helped me see this, he being one of the faculty members leading this policy program at Princeton). So for my postdoc, I jumped to the field of ecosystem services to work with Gretchen Daily.

In the budding field of ecosystem services—where decision-making was central—academics were cozy with business folks, NGO leaders, and policymakers. The theory of change seemed (and seems) to be, “Collaborative information-providing relationships with well-intentioned decision-makers will improve aggregate human well-being.”

Thanks again to Daniel Kahneman—and also Amos Tversky—I already knew that this approach relied on the implicit assumption that people act as rational agents, and that decision-makers would be driven to improve public well-being. I needed to explore the limits of these assumptions (as with models, an assumption can be false—not wholly true—and yet, still useful).

I worked with this theory of change for years—decades even—with colleagues and students. I started with the Natural Capital Project, then worked separately on ecosystem services in central BC, coastal Vancouver Island, and Canada-wide. We had some notable successes, and we encountered roadblocks.

My experience on international science-policy stages has convinced me of the limitations
of prevailing theories of change—especially for some kinds of change. UNESCO theatre,
 Paris, for the IPBES Global Assessment—courtesy of Shizuka Hashimoto.

Through the IPBES Global Assessment, I finally came to see that while this theory of change could work for empowered folks and for changes that aligned with existing systems, it would not work for changes that threaten the structure of systems (transformative changes). Yet these are the exact changes needed, as we found in Chapter 5 (see also here).

So now I’ve thrown my lot in with another theory of change: that people will transform systems when a critical mass of them has four key components (in short: hope; knowledge of the critical moves; infrastructure for action; and a supportive community). Providing those components is the work of CoSphere—our new coalition and community for transformative change to combat the climate-and-ecological crisis.

Close

No matter what you do, it’s likely to take you years to sort through your ideas about effective routes to change. By being explicit about your theories and their supporting assumptions, and by reading and hearing about others’ efforts and experiences, we can speed that process up enormously. Or, at least, that’s my theory. ;)

Next: Identifying the Problem (Step 1.1): An Impactful Interdisciplinary Research Project Is One that Fulfills You

Previous: Why Some PhD Courses Shouldn't Have Grades

The Intro to this series: How to Write a Winning Proposal—in 10 Hard Steps

CHANS Lab Views by Kai Chan's lab is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://chanslabviews.blogspot.com.

What is class participation? Learning (and teaching) integrity

It's central to sustainability. We can't lead a social-ecological transformation without integrity. But if we weren't raised that way, how do we learn it?

by Kai Chan

Modern pedagogical (teaching) techniques centre around the process of learning, rather than the material. Thus the classroom experience is not substitutable with outside reading. The undergrad course I teach (ENVR 430, The Ecological Dimensions of Sustainability) therefore includes a grade for participation. But how to assess students' participation? And is there an opportunity for a deeper kind of learning?

I used to assess participation based on contributions in class. Especially in a COVID-hybrid mode (with simultaneous Zoom and in-person), and with students having very different norms of and comfort with speaking aloud, it was time for a change.

Now the core of participation is showing up and being present and engaged. (Active contributions can make up for an occasional absence.) But I didn't want to take attendance each day. I wanted to cultivate responsibility and integrity more deeply. So I told students that they would self-report their participation, and they were to cultivate honesty in each other by reporting this in groups. I then spot-checked twice, without warning.

The participation self-report template for ENVR 430.

At the end of the course, I was dismayed but unsurprised to see a minority of students who had marked themselves present when my notes had them absent. Mistakes happen, so I didn't want to shame people. So I wrote notes like this, "I took attendance in Week 9, and you weren't on my list. Not assuming motive here, but the protocol here is a 1 mark penalty for a discrepancy."

But my guts were still unsettled. The reported absences didn't add up to my own estimates (based on weekly rough-counts). The integrity gap made me queasy, physically. So I dug in deeper with the following email to the class.

Hi folks,

I hope you're all basking in the glow of a semester nicely wrapped, already enjoying your holidays. Just a few words about your participation self-reports.

I bet that the majority of you were honest in your reports. I know that there were a bunch of you who were there week in and week out. Excellent. A few others were not fully honest. For some, this was clear from the spot-checks. For others, I have my suspicions.

I had this interesting conversation with my brother-in-law last night about free will. He argued that we can't really have free will because—apart from subatomic stochasticity (randomness)—what each of us does is a function of chemical reactions that means it's effectively determined by your biology plus your experiences. His conclusion was that we basically can't fault people for their transgressions, because in a sense, people couldn't do differently.

Conspicuous decisions about honesty and integrity can be life-altering, like forks in the road,
or paths down a mountain ridge.

I don't agree wholly, and the full rebuttal would take too long. But point is, I've been in those situations where you can feel the knife edge sharpness of a decision like you face on a mountain ridge, that would take you one way or another. And which way you go determines what you encounter, and who you believe yourself to be. It can shape your whole life.

I do agree with my brother-in-law that we often can't blame people, because we don't know what led them to their choices. Absolutely. I'm not judging any of you. Many of you were raised very differently than me, for sure. So honesty has a different meaning to you. But here's a plug for integrity *going forward*.

I want to boost as many of you as I can, in your future careers. I would want to write letters of reference for those who really put effort into this course. But anyone who was dishonest in this exercise can't get a full vote of confidence from me. I just can't do it and be true to myself. In aiming for an extra percent or two, they lost a much bigger chance.

But they have a different kind of a chance. They have the chance to make this the moment where they learned that there is *nothing* more valuable than your integrity. When you have good people vouching that you're a good person, you wouldn't believe how far that can take you. Psychological research has shown that little dishonesties set up people to be dishonest in many future events. The same is true when people redefine themselves as being honest.

So for the few of you who were less than fully honest, make this the moment where you realized that integrity is key to the whole endeavour, and where you redefine yourself as someone who is honest with honest people. Exercise your free will, and show that your future is not simply determined by your past actions.

I've made plenty of mistakes. But I pride myself on owning up to them.

For those who were honest, thank you. You've already chosen one side of the mountain ridge. It's sunny on this side. ;)

I apologize for this last, unsolicited lecture. :) Every single one of you is poised to do great things (regardless of the choice just made)!

Happy holidays,

Kai

Three students wrote in earnest, having made honest mistakes (e.g., mixing up weeks 8 and 9 for a reported absence; having a stomach ache during break, when I did the spot check, but having evidence of their presence in the rest of class). I'd suspected a problem for all three, actually (as they all seemed engaged and earnest). They were dismayed at the thought that I would think of them as dishonest. I happily gave them credit for their presence. Mistakes happen!

Was this whole exercise too heavy-handed? Probably! I'll likely figure out a better way when I'm older and wiser. In the meantime, I've got to be true to who I am.

CHANS Lab Views by Kai Chan's lab is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://chanslabviews.blogspot.com.

The joy of pairing academic and athletic exploration

By Harold Eyster, with thanks to Julia Craig, Roxanna Delima, and Kai Chan for comments on an earlier draft

 After spending four years running the streets in Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts, Vancouver was a shock.

The streets of Cambridge are laid out at odd angles and change names every few blocks. Getting from A to B never involves a straight line, and figuring out how to navigate the city took years of getting completely lost on a regular basis.

The chaotic streets of Cambridge, MA. Source: Cambridge Geographical Information Systems https://www.cambridgema.gov/~/media/Files/GIS/allmapsandatlases/CambridgeBaseMap18x24.pdf

In contrast,  Vancouver’s streets are laid out in a well-organized grid, complete with numbered avenues that always face East/West to make it easy to know where you are, what direction you’re facing, and how to get home. 

Source: Jens von Bergmann https://doodles.mountainmath.ca/blog/2018/06/04/vancouver-streets-and-lanes/

While some might appreciate the order of Vancouver’s streets, I found them boring and uninteresting. The order and regularity of the streets failed to pique my curiosity. I had enjoyed the challenge of navigating Boston’s streets. Indeed, of 100 global cities analyzed by Geoff Boeing, Vancouver showed the fourth-highest spatial orderliness. Meanwhile, Boston sits near the bottom of the list.

I needed a new plan for motivating my running and exercise, which was essential to my well-being. I remembered how years ago, while living in Boston, I accompanied my friend Philip Kreycik on a run around Cambridge, Massachusetts. This wasn't just any run though—it was a run around the borders of the city, and his final run on his quest to run every road in Cambridge. During our run, Phillip explained how running every street had really brought the city alive for him and brought new understanding of how the city worked.

Map of our perimeter run of Cambridge, MA

 

Inspired by Philip, perhaps I could do the same in Vancouver?

So I drew on my GIS experience and found some Vancouver street shapefiles, printed out a map of Vancouver's streets, and started my quest to run all of them. This new quest encouraged me to explore, and made each of my runs deliberate, producing new scenery, smells, and adventure—even if all the streets were on a grid.

Each night, I would return to my apartment and use a highlighter to mark the new streets I’d run.

Closeup of the highlighted map that hung on my bedroom wall

These runs revealed hidden treasures: ripe blackberries, blooming trees, a delicious apple tree, sightings of Black Oystercatchers, or unexpected parks and history.

While I was filling in my map, I was in the midst of working on a review of theories about why people do what they do.  Many of these theories posit the importance of psychological and cognitive needs. One such need that cropped up in many papers was the need for exploration. Though it goes by many names—promotion focus, pleasure promotion, mental mapping—researchers tend to agree on one thing, that it is important to people to explore, to become familiar with the unknown, to chart new territory and connect disjunct sets of knowledge.

Big Leaf Maple flowers are easy to miss, but worth a second look.

Why was I doing these runs? Satisfying this need for exploration seems to be part of the answer: the excitement of finding what surprises lay on the road ahead or around the next corner, and fitting this new piece of knowledge into my mental jigsaw puzzle of the city. It was fun to see my academic work beginning to explain what I had at first viewed as an entirely orthogonal pursuit.

Just as my academic work was informing my runs, my runs often provided opportunities for academic breakthroughs. What would start out as a break (that I sometimes did not feel like I had time for), turned into an opportunity for deep thinking and reflection. Sometimes, taking a step back—or a sprint forward, as the case may be—was all I needed to bypass a cognitive bottleneck.

Once, while running along Bailie street, I suddenly realized that I had parametrized a beta distribution entirely wrong. Another time, after spending a few hours struggling to write the conclusion for my dissertation, I went out for a run. My dissertation chapters were wide-ranging and interdisciplinary, and finding the higher level contribution that transcended all five chapters was proving difficult. But out on my run, it all suddenly became clear. As I ran, I started writing the conclusion in my head. When I got back to my apartment, all I had to do was transcribe it to my computer.

As 2021 approached, I had run most of the streets near my apartment. Those remaining were quite far away—getting to them was requiring longer and longer runs. As COVID-19 pandemic kept me away from my family’s usual New Year celebration, I decided to kick off 2021 by completing a longstanding personal goal—my first 100 miler. I started at 4pm,  it started raining at 9pm, and by 12:00 AM, it was pouring—a quintessential Vancouver run. Though I was thousands of kilometers away from my family, I felt a sense of belonging as I jogged through these increasingly-familiar streets. Wet, cold, and tired, but home for the holidays.

The route of my New Year run

A slide from my Zoom dissertation defense. Photo credit: Sophia Winkler-Schor

 

  On a warm July morning this past summer, I defended my dissertation.  Directly afterward and still filled with elation,  my housemate and fellow runner, Krishanu Sankar, and I dashed out the door and ran south to a road that I had missed in the previous years—the last that I had yet to run: Minto Crescent.

Minto Crescent: my last road!

Only 350 m in length, it marked the end of my quest. I had completed my goal of running all 1557 km of streets in Vancouver and defended my PhD on the same day. They had proven to be a complementary pair of goals.

 

Map of Vancouver made by Roxanna Delima showing the streets I ran in Vancouver. 

 Unfortunately, the completion of these milestones did not end as I expected. Just a week prior, the man who had inspired this whole endeavor back in Cambridge, Philip Kreycik, went missing in the Bay Area, while out for a run. Searchers would later find his body. I had been looking forward to writing to him and telling him how he had inspired me to run Vancouver's streets, and how thankful I was for this inspiration. His untimely passing made me realize that I should have reached out to him much earlier to celebrate the journey, instead of waiting until I’d finished. 

Bushtits were frequent companions on my runs.

 

As I reflect on my experience a few months later, I’m struck with how essential this running journey was to my PhD: it provided a perfect complement to the often-stressful graduate experience. I am thankful for the incredible encouragement I had throughout my PhD and while running all the streets in Vancouver. I have also come to appreciate the importance of cherishing whatever place I’m situated in, and learning to look past the gridded map to see the beauty of the individual trees, streets, and neighborhoods.

 

CHANS Lab Views by Kai Chan's lab is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://chanslabviews.blogspot.com.